Core 2 Duo E6600 vs Athlon FX-62 in 3Dmark06/Sandra/Q4

if "soon" is 5 years... yes. If "soon" is 2006, no way.

64Gb Flashdrive with 20Mb/s transfer rate €999

any time soon ?

flashdrive with high transfer speeds at low prices and we are good to go

but your HDD will still be a limited factor....

a change would be great

haha Same here. I'm going to retire my 3500+ and get a X1900 master card for some crossfire goodness.

yes; and I don't dispute that I'm going Core 2 Duo too, S754 A64 3000+ has served its purpose

I totally agree with that. If you have a blazing fast X2 or FX60 setup, you definitely should not upgrade for a while, since I don't think any games coming out are going to use the extra power any time soon. But, if you had to upgrade the day after Conroe came out due to an toasted CPU and mobo, don't you think a fast and cheap Conroe would be a smarter purchase than a high-end X2 or FX62?

if you have a Quad SLI rig you are not going to play at 1600x1200, if you DO you wasted quite a bit of money; you have to find a good balance of resolution/IQ and your GFX and not buy an unnecessary fast setup if you don't plan on exploiting its power, if you do experience a CPU bottleneck you have either an OLD cpu <2Ghz or you are running at resolutions where the extra speed of a faster CPU don't matter anymore.

who cares if you have 80 or 140FPS at 1280x1024 in F.E.A.R. you won't notice the difference and both will play fluently; current and next generation games will still rely on a fast GPU for 99% for rendering each frame, the CPU has not played a large part in games in the last 2-3 years now and I don't see this changing with the continued push with higher resolution textures in game, more complex models, higher resolutions and higher IQ (AA / AF).

if you are a gamer either Core 2 Duo or Athlon X2 will suffice just fine; I would just go with a dual core because of the added bonus of having a 2nd CPU in windows to "play" with so you can burn DVD, encode WMV files and surf the web without delay; with a single core CPU you will notice slowdowns if you combine several of these applications.

games making use of Dual Core CPUs is all fine and dandy, but as it was proven before, you'll only notice the difference at lower resolutions and then again you are comparing 80fps vs 110fps;

can you explain to me which GPUs in what games are "bottlenecked" by the CPU, I would like to hear

in game as in 'in hi res hi quality gaming'
(stating the obvious @koensa)

either A64 or Core 2 will be plenty fast for gamers; if you already A64 switching to Core2 will not give you any tangilble in-game boost; that's what I'm saying

from all I have seen about this New CPU from Intell it is not all that ! IMHO that is . My CPU (Opteron 170) is a very close match . YES I said it and I have seen the benchmarks and did my own as well and I came very close in some and in others I have beaten it . I realy don't think Intell is all that . Yes it is "NEW" tech and a "NEW" generation of CPU but it is not all that IMHO ! Intell made another P4 with more cache is all and a NEW instruction set is all . and there is NO programe that can even use SSE4 so what good is that ?

Far Cry at 800x600 0xAA, 0xAF is much less taxing to the GPU (see bittech review), where we saw the differences more.


Also, Quake 4 can have more or less GPU limited benches, so how do we know?

If you're GPU-limited, it doesn't matter what chip you have past a certain point since it'll all come out the same. I think gamers will care when it comes to more CPU-limited games/scenarios or if they're trying to future-proof their rig. What it really shows me is how little the FX series should mean to gamers in the future, because it's pretty sad when a chip that's about half the price beats or ties you in just about everything.

New names; new monies; new advertising, adding up together you get nothing. Hence, i have invested big money on a 7600GT card

what's new these last 4 years?

the Q4 chart at 1280x1024 4xAA/8xAF is even more fun and basically proves that the Core 2 Duo will mean nothing for gamers...